In Szeged, Hungary, a major witch trial resulted in the burning of over a dozen people, making it one of the largest witch trials in Eastern European history. The proceedings were instigated after a series of unexplained illnesses and cattle deaths were attributed to witchcraft, and the trials employed elaborate torture to extract confessions. The Szeged trials were notable for their late date, occurring decades after most of Western Europe had abandoned witch prosecutions.

The Szeged witch trials influenced Hungarian and Central European literary traditions, appearing in the poetry and folklore of the region as a symbol of collective irrationality. The trials inspired Hungarian Romantic poets who used the burning of witches as a metaphor for the destruction of rural vernacular culture they sought to preserve, and the case entered the broader European Gothic literary imagination as evidence that the darkness of the witch-hunt era persisted at the margins of Enlightenment Europe.